Sometimes, the price of oil and the collapse of the housing market and the fall of the freddies and maes and indimacs of the world, that can all weigh on you a bit. On the other side, the feeling that there are things that need to get done at home and at work can become overwhelming as well.
There is this cognitive dissonance between working on self-sufficiency at home and then having to commute 80 miles a day that can cause a low-temperature sort of boil or ferment that can add to the stress.
I am also rather frustrated with the way a recent meeting I set up for re-localizing the food production in our region went. One person came (she was awesome! Hope to get to know her better and I am sure she will be doing neat things) and then we were rather negatively harassed by a very drunk and increasingly belligerent homeless woman.
Really threw us both off kilter.
Made me think a lot about how complex community building and crafting has to be. I came to overt terms with something that has been with me all my life (due to growing up with an alcoholic grandfather): I do not suffer drunks at all. I throw up an instant zero-tolerance mindset. I know I should be tolerant on some compassionate level but it is hard for me. Part of it stems from this expectation that I have that adults are expected to be functional on a substantial basis otherwise they are wasting the time of the community. This made my thoughts go toward how I would cope with dealing with this sort of problem if society went into a collapse mode and we all had to fend for ourselves much more.
Needless to say, this is all heavy stuff!
I am extremely grateful to be able to walk out my back door and into our garden and tend it, pick a few weeds, nip the suckers on the tomatoes, look for incipient disease or infestations. I get to go look at the chickens in the chicken tractor or in the chicken run. I can go and watch the sweetheart goats, romping and nibbling bushes, head butting each other. I can watch the llama, the shy thing she is. I can wander to the edge of the garden and pick wild blueberries.
I am going to share some of the scenes around the garden in the past week. Hope you enjoy and perhaps relax a bit yourself.
Peas, such beautiful peas.
We had our first batch of fresh shelled peas yesterday, super sweet!
Cabbages grow with such rigor, I am LOVING them just as plants right now. I planted loads of them along with some hot peppers.. am going to make some sauerkraut and also kimchi with lactofermentation (using whey from raw goats milk). This will be a fantastic source of vitamin C and other things for the rest of the year.
Broccoli is a luxury but I love growing this vigorous enormous plants! Its my conceit 
Cherry Peppers will be used in the kimchi and perhaps other sorts of pickles.
Chickens in the tractor, hanging out.
Tomatoes growing like gang busters.
Bad baby goats that are trying to and having success getting into the chicken pen. Why? I have no idea other than – its there, lets go there.
Misty who has one black eye and one blue eye.
Blueberries
Acorn squash
Thanks for visiting!
